According to the Register, Microsoft is lining up to buy Macromedia. It's Flash they want. via [Scripting News]

Ah, now this makes sense. Not because of the anti-J2EE nonsense in the Register article, but 90% because of Flash and 10% because of Cold Fusion. The Price:Book ratio for Macromedia …

Joe Strummer, RIP. The one time I saw Joe Strummer in concert was when he was singing vocals for The Pogues. Oh man, that was a good concert. Well, I guess I know what's on the turntable today...

DirectX 9 Released. Including managed libraries and C# support! Woo-hooo! Note that you have to download not just the DirectX for C# SDK, but the DirectX SDK 9.0 Developer Runtime in order to get the Managed Direct X (MDX) libraries.

But that doesn't mean I'm not happy to see you, too

The LAT notes the conviction this week of a man who smuggled rare monkeys into the U.S.--in his pants. Upon discovering four endangered birds and 50 exotic orchids in his suitcase, officials at Los Angeles International Airport …

Web server statistics: JSP fastest growing server-side scripting language, 1% of ASP.NET servers running on Linux. Interesting stuff from Netcraft.

Elcomsoft acquitted. Even though I sell Thinking in C# via Adobe Acrobat and therefore am vulnerable to piracy of my intellectual property, I am happy for this verdict. I don't know what is a fair policy towards digital media, but the DMCA ain't it.

This comment on this post asked if my argument meant that AI is impossible:

I don't think that follows from my argument. The greatest challenge with AI is that we have no good theories on the non-material representations comprising consciousness. Brain mechanics we're beginning to get a handle on, and …

I hope Microsoft doesn't buy Borland. Apparently, in light of IBM's acquisition of Rational, there's been talk that Microsoft may acquire Borland, which bought TogetherSoft earlier this year. I hope not. Microsoft does not need Together/J, a Java-based UML tool -- they have Visio if they want a diagramming tool …

X#, A Native XML-Processing Language, On Tap From Microsoft? There are already several "native XML" programming languages (I like the looks of this one) and certainly it makes sense for there to be XML language(s!) for .NET.

When I was a kid, we had to carry our punch-cards through snowdrifts 10 feet tall to get to Route 128 to run our programs...

Joel Spolsky, one the best commentators on programming, has two related articles which lay out the premise that computer programming today is harder than it …